Tuesday, December 5, 2017

12/6/17 ABIGAIL CHILD'S "ACTS AND INTERMISSIONS"

A new experimental documentary feature utilizing the life of Emma Goldman to explore the resurgence of protest in the 21st century. The work is hybrid and prismatic, including contemporary footage, archive and re-enactment to expose the continuing conflicts between labor and property, revolutionary purity and personal freedom.
The film performs a time travel, intercutting moments from Emma’s life with her prescient speeches, weaving industrial era factory labor with computer data centers with Emma’s intimate diaries—to explore human vulnerabilities, compromises and choices. Known as the “most dangerous woman alive,” Emma was also passionate and sexual; beauty/art/humor part of the freedoms for which she was fighting. The film creates a dialogue on individual liberties and anarchism: how we risk and how we are compromised? Questions that have become only more relevant in our current political climate.
Director's Statement:
"The film is the second in my Trilogy of Women and Ideology. Each part asks: How Ideologies fail women? What do we give up in our struggle to be more than 'merely female? The first in the trilogy, UNBOUND, retells the story of Mary Shelley, examining 19th century Romanticism through “imaginary home movies” shot in Rome. This second film explores Emma Goldman and Anarchism, shot in New York City, in a series of non-hierarchical fragmented ‘memory’ chapters. The work’s structure is influenced by films as diverse as 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould and Hollis Frampton’s Surface Tension. The third part of the Trilogy will explore Science in the 21st century, focusing on virtual women and androids." -Abigail Child, January 2017